Devices may use a variety of wireless protocols to communicate with one another, such as IEEE 801.11 (Wi-Fi) or Bluetooth. For example, a wireless gateway may be wirelessly connected to mobile devices such as smartphones, tablet computers, laptop computers, and the like, and may provide a connection between such devices and the Internet or other wired network to which the wireless gateway is connected. But depending on the particular devices, a user may need to have a certain amount of technical expertise to initially establish a connection between the devices. For example, a wireless gateway using IEEE 802.11 may be assigned one or more extended service set identifiers, or ESSIDs (sometimes referred to as SSIDs), each of which may be a sequence of numbers or letters that identifies that wireless gateway to other devices, preferably uniquely. The wireless gateway may broadcast one or more of its ESSIDs so as to alert other devices to the wireless gateway's presence on the network. The wireless gateway also may have one or more access credentials, such as a login and password, or an encryption key, which may be associated with a particular one of the ESSIDs. The wireless gateway may be programmed to permit devices to connect that (1) transmit the proper ESSID to the wireless gateway, and (2) transmit the proper credential to the wireless gateway. Technically savvy users within Wi-Fi range readily may be able to obtain the ESSID of a wireless gateway and the proper credential, and to suitably configure a mobile device to wirelessly transmit that ESSID and credential to the wireless gateway so as to connect to the wireless gateway. But users outside of the wireless gateway's Wi-Fi range may lack sufficient technical savvy to connect their mobile device to the gateway via the Internet using the gateway's wide area network (WAN) internet protocol (IP) address, and even if they could connect to the gateway they may not be able to communicate meaningfully with it.
Moreover, different mobile devices connected to a given wireless gateway may not be able to share information readily with one another. A technically savvy user may be able to set up a local media server based on Windows™ Media Player (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond Wash.), or the Home Sharing feature within iTunes™ (Apple Inc., Cupertino Calif.), or other commercially available software on a personal computer that is connected to the wireless gateway. Mobile devices that are directly connected to the gateway via Wi-Fi and having the proper software thereon then may access digital media, such as photographs or videos, stored on the local media server. But devices that are not directly connected to the wireless gateway may not access the digital media. So-called “cloud” based services also are commercially available that permit mobile devices to share digital media over the Internet, typically providing a fixed amount of storage space, sometimes in exchange for a fee. For example, iCloud™ (Apple Inc., Cupertino Calif.) is a service that stores a user's digital media such as music, photos, apps, documents, books, mail, notes, reminders, contacts, and calendars on a remote server. The remote server then pushes such media to any of the user's enrolled mobile devices over Wi-Fi or over a cellular data network such as 3G or 4G, without the need to connect to a particular gateway or local computer.
Certain aspects of cloud based services such as iCloud™ may limit their usefulness to certain users, and thus may limit their adoption. For example, because a cloud based service may store the personal information of millions of users within a central or distributed database, some users may be concerned about the privacy of their information. Moreover, such a database may represent a particularly appealing target for hackers, because of the potential to access the information of so many users simultaneously. Additionally, the amount of storage space available to the user typically is fixed and relatively low, with additional increments of storage space available at an increasing cost. For example, the iCloud™ service presently provides the user with 5 GB of free storage, and charges a fee for additional storage. The cloud based service also may limit the types of information that the user may store.
Thus, what is needed is a system and method to facilitate the sharing of digital information between mobile devices.